Interview: WARTILE Developer Playwood Project

Wartile is a medieval fantasy themed strategy game that invites the player to select a band of miniature figurines and embark on a campaign or a multiplayer match, set on gorgeous diorama Battle Boards. Figurines, their special abilities and your hand of godly and tactical cards are the tools to rule the board.

The game captures the tabletop feeling, while adding its own digital style, magic and humor. Tactics weigh heavily in the game, where a unique cooldown system adds the flavor of turn based games and gives you the time to outsmart, trap or even use Godly powers on your enemy.

Despite being in Pre-Alpha, the game already has a pretty spectacular look, with the core gameplay mechanics and a Viking Class already in place. Over the next few months, Playwood Project plan to introduce more Classes, as well to expand on what’s already in the Pre-Alpha version of the game. We sat down with the team behind Wartile in order to get a sense of the game, as well as to find out what exactly will be added to the game during the final few months of development.

WARTILE seems to be the first title under the Playwood Games banner. Even though each of you has extensive experience in the video game industry, has there been any nerves about releasing Playwood Games’ first title?

Playwood Project: We haven’t really released our first title yet, but we have release an early Pre-Alpha demo for everyone to try out, and that is some achievement to us, and we have of course been extremely excited to see how it was received. Luckily we have not seen any crucial bugs in the build yet and the response have been really positive.

WARTILE is obviously heavily influenced by traditional tabletop games, while still maintaining its own unique feel. What was it that drew the team to create a tabletop influenced game? Were there many tabletop titles that had a major influence?

Playwood Project: The first draft of WARTILE was focused on creating a special feeling or experience for the player. We wanted to create a living table top board game with living figurines as a video game. Furthermore, it should not be turn based since it also had to reflect the memory of actually playing with figurines. From there on iteration on iteration and find inspiration, not so much from other video games or table top games but more from the idea of playing a table top game, so not what you do, but what your imagine you are doing. If that makes any sense.

Vikings are one of the major cultures in the game. Will there be many different cultures added to the game between now and when the game is finished?

Playwood Project: We see the WARTILE universe as a platform where we in time can build and expand into a lot of cultural campaigns, small independent story pieces, new multiplayer modes and game boards, Figurine classes.

The Viking Campaign is the first playable campaign we introduce. After that we would like to follow up with an English single player campaign. And without revealing to much of the stretch goals from the Kickstarter we are launching let’s say it could be fun to make something with Templar Knights and Crusaders, or Spartan warriors during the Persian conquest or other fascinating historical eras and mythologies.

Since we’re on the topic of possible additions to the game; there are already a number of Classes announced for the game, each with their own skills etc. Will Classes be the same for each of the cultures, or will there be similar classes with their own look and feel? And will there be many additions to the Classes between now and when WARTILE is released?

Playwood Project: Some classes with have a strong resemblance to each other but they will have some ability cards that are unique to that specific cultural theme and other classes would be culture unique. We are also planning to add additional classes before release, but we have finalized any other classes yet.

Each figurine will have Ability Cards, more of which can be unlocked as each figurine levels up. During gameplay, you’ve said on your Kickstarter that each figurine will only be able to equip one Ability Card at a time. How many of these Ability Cards will be available to choose from for each of the figurines?

Playwood Project: This early in development we are not sure of any exact number, but you can expect around 2-5 abilities for each class at release.

WARTILE also features Action Cards which can be drawn from your deck during gameplay. How many Action Card will be available in the game? Will all of them be available from the start of the game, or will they have to be unlocked like the Ability Cards?

Playwood Project: Action cards can either be Godly and Tactical cards. Godly and Tactical cards will often be unlocked on side missions, called challenge boards. The challenge boards are not a part of the main story and some of them will be tied to stories from Norse mythology. Before you can wield the wrath of Thor, you must pass his challenge.

The game also features a Multiplayer One vs One mode, where players will be able to take on their friends. Is there much of a difference between the single player campaign and the multiplayer mode in terms of levels or anything else?

Playwood Project: The style of the levels will be different in campaign and the multiplayer boards. We really want to give our players some very different options in the multiplayer category. We are working on two game types, one is a Classic MOBA setup where two players dual it out on a balanced map. The other is a quest oriented map, where one team need to complete one or more objectives in order to win. Examples of this could be to reach certain control points, burn down enemy buildings or kidnap villagers while the other player tries to defend. We are also investigating into Co-op or up to 4 player games, but can’t reveal much here.

WARTILE has recently gotten a Kickstarter campaign. What was it that persuaded the team to look to crowdfunding in order to complete the game?

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Playwood Project: We are at a stage where we have something really cool we wanted to show off and through a Kickstarter campaign we can speed up the amount of feedback we get from the community. If we get successfully funded, this Kickstarter is also a way for us to stay independent and keep our creative vision intact.

Speaking of Kickstarter; the games campaign seems to offer a lot of rewards for donors. Was there much difficulty in coming up what to offer people in exchange for funding?

Playwood Project: A big part of WARTILEis customizing your unit and finding different unique weapons, armors and unlocking new figurines, so for us it was a natural extension of this aspect to create cool tiers for our backers.

You’ve also released a pre-Alpha version of the game. What can we expect to change between now and when WARTILE is released, should the Kickstarter be successful?

Playwood Project: WARTILE is still at an early stage and we expect a lot to change. First off people can expect a lot more content than we currently have in the Pre-Alpha Demo. We are currently only showing one real map in the Demo, but you can expect 10+ beautiful diorama battle boards, a number of smaller challenge boards as well as several multiplayer boards. In our creation process we iterate a lot and the final product will surely feel even better to play and look at even prettier. We will further more expand on the Viking figurines allowing you to set your War Band from a number of different Vikings as well as allowing players to play with the English soldiers from the Campaign in multiplayer.